Barney Frank A Communist?

There was a great deal of ugliness from the Tea Party yesterday. There was spitting. There was racism. There was anti-gay hatred.

For me, the most telling incident was in the moment when U.S. Representative Barney Frank faced a crowd of Tea Party protesters who screamed out to Barney Frank, accusing him of being a “Homo Communist”. Congressman Frank does not deny being homosexual, though he doesn’t call himself a “homo”, because that’s an insulting term.

In what sense, though, could Barney Frank be accused of being a Communist? Barney Frank has been a partner to the world’s top capitalists, helping them to take hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people. That’s not what Communists did. Communists aimed to take money from banks and give it to workers. As Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank has worked to preserve, not dismantle, the capitalist system.

For Tea Party protesters to call Barney Frank a Communist suggests that they simply use the term “Communist” to attack anybody or anything they don’t like. It suggests that the Tea Party has moved forward on a surge of anger without a desire for accurate information. It’s not a movement seeking enlightenment or progress of the human condition. It is a revolution of ignorance.